Europe's hottest startups 2014: Amsterdam

Amsterdam's international outlook acts as a gateway to continental Europe. English is widely spoken and Amsterdam Airport Schiphol is one of the continent's busiest and most efficient. The city is also a convenient launchpad for Scandinavian markets, which, with their high GDP per capita and high broadband penetration rates, can be lucrative for startups. Crucially, Amsterdam measures high on quality-of-life indices, which makes it easy to hire talent. "It has the culture, the canals - it's not hard to attract people due to the quality of life here," explains Reinout te Brake, founding partner of the GameOn fund.

Rockstart Accelerator holds spring and summer programmes for startups

Nick Wilson

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Europe's hottest startups 2014: Paris

ByJoão Medeiros

The Human app encourages its users to move for 30 minutes a day.

It tracks physical activity, encourages you to unlock badges and lets you share achievements on social media. "In a world where a sedentary lifestyle has become the standard, it's not easy to motivate people to make healthy changes that fit into their busy schedules," explains cofounder and CEO Renato Valdés Olmos. "Human exists to do that." He claims that the app helps people move up to 75 per cent more a day within six weeks of using the app. It's proved popular: Valdés Olmos plans to double his team before the year's end.

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E-commerce startup The Cloakroom helps men buy clothes online: new members are set a "style quiz" that informs a consultation with a stylist. Items are then shipped to customers to try and buy if they wish. "We are generating almost €200,000 per month," claims cofounder Asbjørn Jørgensen. It raised a second round of funding of

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Europe's hottest startups 2014: Helsinki

Launched in 2010, open-source search and analytics service Elasticsearch is one of the few Dutch startups to raise more than $30 million in funding. It is designed to search documents in near real-time and counts StumbleUpon, Wikimedia, Etsy, Foursquare, Quora and SoundCloud among its customers. Its revenue grew by 400 per cent in 2013 and it has been downloaded six million times.

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ByNicholas Tufnell

Silk helps its users manage structured and unstructured online content as easy-to-search collections of web pages and visualisations. In October 2013 it raised $1.6 million in seed funding, bringing total funding to $3.7 million.

AliveShoes lets us design, make and distribute our own footwear, offering design, communication, e-commerce and manufacturing tools to develop brands from scratch. Once the shoes are designed, users need seven orders within 30 days in order for the items to go into production. They are then made in Le Marche, Italy (AKA "shoe valley"), and are shipped to buyers within four to six weeks.

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Europe's hottest startups 2014: Tel Aviv

ByMadhumita Venkataramanan

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Launched in 2012, the Casengo app helps companies respond to their customers more efficiently. It mixes Zendesk-like support software with chat apps to enable speedy response to customer queries. All messages -- be they from email, chat or social media -- arrive in the same inbox, making them easier to deal with in a unified manner. It's being used by more than 2,000 businesses and raised

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Europe's hottest startups 2014: London

ByOlivia Solon

Funded by Niklas Zennström's Atomico, Fashiolista is an online fashion community where its members share style choices by adding a "heart" button on others' looks. The company launched in 2010 and it now has almost two million users. Fashion director Emilie Sobels says 2014 is about "taking our expertise to mobile and the offline fashion retail environment".

Based in Amsterdam (despite having a Utrecht address), Blendle describes itself as "iTunes for journalism", offering a pay-per-article model through its app. Users can browse newspapers and magazines - most of which are locked behind paywalls in the Netherlands -- for free, and follow others to see what they are looking at, only paying for what they end up reading. Founded by 27-year-old ex-journalists Marten Blankesteijn and Alexander Klöpping, Blendle even offers a money-back guarantee if you don't like what you read. Publishers set the price and take 70 per cent of the revenue, and Blendle takes the rest. During its beta phase, the startup had 17,000 registrations, with 71 per cent aged under 40 -- a tricky audience for publishers to reach.

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Wercker helps developers test and deploy code on a social platform. It aims to fit between code-storing platforms such as GitHub and Bitbucket, and where applications are deployed, such as Amazon Web Services. "We help reduce risk and waste by enabling developers to test, build and release to the cloud," explains CEO Micha Hernandez van Leuffen. Next up? To scale the platform, operations and team in the US.